Metaphor and Relevance

Sperber and Wilson have developed a cognitive theory of human communication that sees the interpretation process as an inferential strategy using linguistic information and other kinds of evidence to identify the speaker's informative intention. The pragmatic principles are therefore not language-specific and can be better defined as "problem-solving" reasoning schemes or "controlled guesswork". Although metaphor and figurative language are studied within the framework of Relevance Theory, the authors don't take full advantage of the paradigmatic role of such utterances to the Inferential Model. The aim of this paper is to show how the striking similarities between metaphoric utterances interpretation and the Inferential Model of communication can be used to support this theoretical proposal and to reveal some of the achievements of non-demonstrative inference. Interaction Theory, as well as some recent cognitive-based studies on metaphor, will be discussed and compared.

1 Relevance Theory and the Inferential Model of
communication

Relevance Theory, as presented in Sperber and Wilson (1986)1,
is an attempt to explain the general principles of human communication.
Following Grice's William James Lectures, the authors' main thesis
is that the expectations created by communication itself play
a major role in utterance interpretation and are therefore constitutive
of this process. Unlike Grice, however, Sperber and Wilson don't
postulate a kind of conversational "ethics" "observance
of which is regarded as providing standards of rational discourse"
(Grice 1989: 368). The authors
maintain that interpretation is
primarily a cognitive phenomenon which depends on our ways of
processing information. The co-operative or contract-like dimension
of human communication is thus external to interpretation proper
and is already a consequence of the nature of human cognition.

For the Inferential Model of communication (which is opposed to
the Code Model), the semantic content of sentences, obtained by
linguistic decoding, is only a part of the evidence provided by
the communicator and is subordinated to the inferential process
of identifying its communicative intention,2 which
is the core of utterance interpretation. Unlike the decoding mechanisms,
which are highly specialized  domain-specific  and therefore
modular in Fodor's sense (Fodor
1983), inferential abilities involved
in interpretation are not language-specific and share the properties
of central or global thought processes: they are
non-demonstrative
(the addressee constructs a hypothetical assumption which can
be confirmed or not) and informationally non-encapsulated because
they can use as premise any information available to the system.
In this sense Pragmatics should not be conceived of as a separate
module, but rather as "the domain in which grammar, logic and
memory interact." (Wilson and Sperber
1991b: 583).

Within this model utterance interpretation is thought of as a
product or a resultant of an inferential calculation that
includes
both deductive and non-demonstrative reasoning schemes. Although
the process of "guessing" the communicator's intended
assumption takes place in two stages (hypothesis formation and
hypothesis confirmation), deductive reasoning plays a crucial
role in the whole process. Sperber and Wilson underline the fact
that such a system of rules is very useful in that it allows maximal
utilisation of the available information because it assures the
accuracy of the conclusions drawn by the system and therefore
restricts the processing of new assumptions. In fact, most of
the chapter dedicated to inference is about deductive rules.3

One of the main features of non-demonstrative inference  that
importantly approaches utterance interpretation and scientific
theorizing, and makes it difficult to study them both  is the
free access to any information held by the system:

So, for example, in creating a scientific hypothesis to account
for a certain range of data it is legitimate to rely on analogies
with other domains of knowledge, seemingly random association
of ideas, and any other source of inspiration that comes to hand.
Once a hypothesis has been formed, the extent to which it is regarded
as confirmed will depend on how well it fits not only with neighbouring
domains of knowledge but with one's whole overall conception of
the world. (Wilson and Sperber
1991a: 380)

According to Relevance Theory, the context used to process an
assumption is not given prior to the interpretation process but,
rather, constructed and modified by the addressee as necessary;
therefore, the construction of the context is an essential part
of the interpretation process. The context may include any information,
whether stored in the memory or directly obtained from the encyclopaedic
entries of the concepts which are the output of the linguistic
device. As the authors note, this information, which is to be
combined with verbally communicated information, does not need
to be true or valid (in a logical sense) but rather
efficient
for the current purposes.

For Sperber and Wilson, humans process information in order to
improve their representations of the world according to their
own interests. In this sense the main goal of human cognition
is relevance  the optimisation of one's cognitive resources,
i.e., achieving cognitive effects without much processing effort.
As far as human communication is concerned, each individual expects
utterance interpretation to achieve contextual effects
(modifications
in one's assumptions as a consequence of interaction between new
decoded information and old representations) without requiring
too much processing effort, and will therefore interpret utterances
accordingly. This brings us to the Principle of Relevance: "Every
act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of
its own optimal relevance" (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 159).

Because any utterance is expected to be relevant, the addressee's
task will consist of looking for the contextual assumptions that
will achieve the most productive utterance processing. Nevertheless,
the construction of the context for utterance processing is not
unlimited because every context expansion involves processing
effort.

Since in recognizing an intended assumption individuals have free
access to any stored information, the quantity and quality of
the contextual assumptions depend mainly on the addressee's availability,
as well as on the kind of utterance (Goalty 1997 relates Relevance
Theory and Register Theory, attempting to adjust the notion of
Relevance to the characters and specific purposes of different
genres). Although Relevance Theory is a cognitive theory of human
communication, not all of the contextual effects need to be seen
as "cognitive" or "informational". In fact,
an utterance may be optimally relevant by producing more or less
determinate social and emotional changes in the context and thereby
compensate the processing effort.

Since both explicit and implicit communication can be more or
less determinate and there is a continuum between strongly conveyed
thoughts (as when the intended assumption is very close to the
logical form of the utterance) and a complex of vague thoughts,
more or less freely inferred by the addressee (e.g. in metaphoric
utterances), Grice's account of human communication is not adequate.
According to Sperber and Wilson, it is necessary to make a distinction
between strong implicatures and weak implicatures. While the
former
have been studied by pragmatists, the latter cannot be accounted
for within a framework that sees communication as "strong
communication".

In fact, in many cases relevance is achieved by the recovery not
of a single fully determinate assumption, but by the identification
of an open and wide complex of propositions whose contextual effects
may only partially coincide with the ones intended by the communicator.
While some of these assumptions will be salient, so that it would
be impossible not to recover them, the recovery of others will
depend mostly on the addressee's responsibility. These propositions
are not recovered simultaneously, but according to a certain hierarchy,
which partly explains the difficulty, or even impossibility, of
finding a paraphrase for figures of speech that accounts for their
cognitive "richness" and "condensation". In
this sense, weak implicature could not be conceived of outside
a framework where communication is seen as providing and interpreting
evidence about the communicative intention and the degree of participation
required (and granted) to recover it.

2 Metaphor

Max Black's account of metaphor, known as Interaction Theory
because it is based on Richards' view of metaphor as an "interaction
of two thoughts", represents a break in metaphor theorizing.
Unlike the traditional views of metaphor, which explain its content
by developing the metaphoric utterance into a comparison or describe
its interpretation as the finding of a lacking word (tertium verbum)
improperly substituted by the displaced word, the interaction
view sees metaphor as an intellectual operation with a cognitive
import. More importantly, the transfer or projection, which
allows
us to see one object in terms of another, therefore producing
a redescription or a change of representations, is presented as
"a creative response from a competent reader." (Black 1979: 29)

The metaphoric interaction takes place between the focus (the
concept of dinosaur) and the frame ("the sense of an utterance",
which is literal) in that the reader will apply the system of
associated commonplaces evoked by dinosaur to the other concept.
By system of associated commonplaces or implication complex
Black
means "a set of standard beliefs [...] (current platitudes) that
are the common possession of the members of some speech community."
(1968: 40) This set of propositions
shall be conventionally and
spontaneously evoked; they are culture dependent and may be created
or altered ad hoc by the author. Black notices that the success
of metaphor interpretation does not depend on the truth-value
of these assertions. In fact, these chunks of information correspond
to the stereotypical features which shape conventional representation
of the objects rather than to scientific truths (cf. Metzing 1981
and Fillmore 1985 about the concept of
frame).

So in the example sentence the system of commonplaces evoked by
dinosaur would include some of the following propositions:

(2)

a.

A dinosaur is a pre-historic animal.

b.

A dinosaur is a reconstitution that relies on our knowledge about
the evolution of life on Earth.

c.

A dinosaur fed on plants.

d.

Bone fragments and other remains are used as evidence for the
reconstitution.

e.

Nobody has ever seen a living dinosaur.

According to Black, the task of the hearer consists of constructing
a corresponding set of assertions that fits the principal subject,
i.e., the frame. In this sense, the way we conceive of "the
sense of an utterance" is mediated by our representation
of a dinosaur, or rather by the system of propositions it evokes,
which is used as an instrument of description that organizes and
transforms our view of the other subject. The metaphor is therefore
like a filter which hides some aspects of the frame and reveals
other ones (which couldn't be discovered otherwise). In this sense
the analogy does not precede the metaphor but is rather created
by it  a conceptual innovation is therefore produced by the
interpretation
process.

In constructing the new implications "some of the 'associated
commonplaces' themselves suffer metaphorical change of meaning
in the process of transfer from the subsidiary to the principal
subject." (Black 1968: 42) For instance, in equating a dinosaur
and the sense of an utterance it is necessary to transform the
palaeontologist/scientist into an agent that is constructing
an object so that we can identify him and the hearer of an utterance

in this analogy they have the same purpose or the same
function,
i.e., they are seen as two instantiations (in different domains)
of the same abstract concept. Thus the complex of implications
resulting from the metaphorical projection may include "a set
of subordinate metaphors" (ibidem) through which the meaning of
the metaphor is extended. In the example sentence, such metaphors
would be

The words and actions of the speaker are the evidence and remains
used to reconstruct a dinosaur.

c.

General knowledge about the world and communication is the scientific
knowledge about the evolution of life on Earth.

According to Black, the connections between both subjects may
be grounded on analogy or on other relationships that allow these
"shifts" of meaning. In fact, Black says very little
about the constraints on this projection.

Although Black mentions these subordinate or minor metaphors which
are intended to be less important (his analogy with musical overtones
is very significant) as an objection to the interaction theory 
which would thereby become a circular explanation  it seems
to me that they should not be seen as a problem, but rather as
an achievement of this account.

In fact, as a description of the products5 of metaphor
interpretation, they constitute an important insight about analogical
reasoning. According to Holland et alii (1993), the mapping between
an analogy's source- and target-domain (focus and frame in Black's
terms) is the resultant of an inductive schema which is an ad
hoc abstract category built to relate two distant domains.
Correspondences
between them are made possible by an identity of structure and
roles created by the "role-like category" which is less
specific than any of the domains and can continue to evolve as
new examples require to be integrated in it. In the example sentence,
interpreting the metaphor means that the hearer should identify
two agents  hearer and palaeontologist  pursuing the
same purpose
 the reconstitution of an object  with the help of
instruments
or means, some of them directly connected with the object they
want to reconstitute (the words and actions of the speaker, bones
and other remains from the dinosaurs), others being supplied by
the agent and helping to organize or give sense to the first ones
(general knowledge about communication and inferring the speaker's
intention, scientific knowledge to interpret archaeological data).
The schema "someone has the task of trying to reconstitute
an object by using and interpreting the available evidence"
allows the hearer to integrate the two disparate concepts and
give sense to the metaphorical utterance, since both "the
sense of an utterance" and "dinosaur" can be seen
as instantiations of this more general schema.

As shown in the example, the set of implications constructed for
the primary subject, i.e., the metaphorical mapping, requires
the hearer to transform or elaborate the information provided
by the focal and the frame concepts in a new category. According
to Gibbs (1994), one of the main limitations of Black's account
of metaphor is that it identifies the meaning of the metaphor
with the meaning of the frame (the resultant of the interpretation
process would thus be its redescription), thus contradicting the
sense of "interaction". In fact, since metaphorical
projection is unidirectional and the focus is conceived of as
a "filter", only the frame should be altered in this
process. Moreover, that Black sees the production of subordinate
metaphors as a problem of his account shows that the new implications
are intended to be literal assertions, as if such a "translation"
would be a condition for the metaphor's intelligibility. On the
contrary, Gibbs argues, very often the new implications can only
be understood within the very metaphor and are easily understood
by the speakers, who speak and think with a poetic mind.

Gibb's objections to Black's interaction view also concern other
models of metaphor interpretation that describe it as a projection
between two domains. Such theories find it difficult to explain
how the mapping takes place, i.e., how new features that cannot
be found in either the primary or the secondary subject result
from metaphor interpretation and allow conceptual innovation.
I think, though, that Black's remarks about the subordinate metaphors
can lead us to some recent achievements in metaphor theorizing
and even corroborate them. In fact, by presenting metaphor as
a cognitive operation, whose import cannot be communicated otherwise,
Black's theory underlies interactionist and cognitive approaches
and in a certain sense already predicts these developments.

One of the most recent developments in metaphor theorizing has
appeared within the framework of the theory of "blending"
or "conceptual blending". This approach explains metaphor
as a particular case of a general and pervasive cognitive process
known as "blending" or "conceptual integration"
(for a general presentation of both the framework and the linguistic
and conceptual phenomena it applies to see Fauconnier and Turner
1994). According to this view, metaphorical projection takes place
between mental spaces, which are defined as temporary representations
constructed by the speakers when they conceive of an experience
(imagined or not). These mental spaces largely depend on stable
knowledge structures which are stored in memory (e.g. conceptual
metaphors identified by Lakoff and Johnson
1980), but unlike them
mental spaces are short-term representations intended to account
for the conceptualisation needs of the speakers, some of which
are novel and unique.

Unlike Black's account, this model posits the existence of four
(or more) mental spaces, namely: two "input spaces"
(which correspond to the focus and the frame), a "generic"
space which comprises the abstract "skeletal" structure
shared by both of them and a "blend" space, where the
representations from the input spaces, and eventually from other
domains, combine originating an innovative conceptualisation (the
latter are called "middle spaces").6 This
four-space model interestingly accounts for both processes and
products of metaphor interpretation which could not be accounted
for by two-space models.

In this sense, the generic space explains how the constructed
system of implications about the frame gets to correspond the
one evoked by the focus and how it implies a 'metaphorical change
of meaning' of the commonplaces themselves. On the other hand,
the blended space makes it possible to explain the novelty or
"emergent structure" which could not be accounted for
in Black's theory (although, as we saw, one of the main insights
of his theory, explicitly stated in Black 1979, was the acknowledgment
of metaphor's role in conceptual innovation). In fact, in constructing
a blended space hearers recruit information from different sources
(other than the two input spaces involved in the analogical projection)
 in an operation known as "completion" (cf. Grady et
alii 1999: 5)  and combine it according to a logic that is
constitutive
of the blend and cannot therefore be found in any of the input
spaces (cf. e.g. the analysis of Bertrand de Born's character
in Fauconnier and Turner 1994). This process, which accounts for
different phenomena, from counterfactuals to fiction, means that
by trying to make sense of a specific situation (which can also
be triggered by the understanding of a particular utterance) humans
derive inferences that could not be predicted or drawn from any
of the information sources alone  knowledge is generated by the
very process of integrating them.

3 Metaphor and Relevance

In the beginning of this paper I argued that Relevance Theory
does not take full advantage of metaphor's significance as a paradigm
of the Inferential Model of communication. I now wish to argue
the "strategic role"7 of metaphor in the
understanding of the interpretation process as it is conceived
of within the framework of Relevance Theory.

Sperber and Wilson define utterance interpretation as a construction
of the addressee that depends on general reasoning strategies
("problem-solving" abilities) rather than on specialized
cognitive processes (i.e. linguistic decoding mechanisms). The
addressee identifies the communicator's intended assumption by
formulating an interpretative hypothesis which may or may not
be validated. In this sense, utterance interpretation depends
mainly on a non-demonstrative inferential calculation. Similarly,
there is a long tradition in looking at metaphor interpretation
as a "risky" or a "discovery" procedure, in
that the mappings allowing the hearer to make sense of the utterance
are somehow "genial" and result from an inferential
process which does not have a proof value.

In this sense, by identifying the "causally relevant" (Holland
et alii 1993: 297) relations that allow the mapping of two disparate
concepts, and therefore finding a solution for the "meaning
problem" created by metaphor, the inferential calculation
responsible for metaphor interpretation constitutes a hyperbolic
manifestation of the reasoning strategies through which an addressee
validates the relevance presumption. According to Holland et alii
(1993), inductive reasoning mechanisms are cognitive processes
that allow humans to cope with the complexity and indeterminacy
of their everyday lives, when they have to act and make decisions
in the absence of full information. Both analogical reasoning
and the interpretative hypothesis through which the addressee
reconstitutes the intended assumption can be comprised in the
group of "all inferential processes that expand knowledge in the
face of uncertainty" (Holland et alii 1993: 1).

Moreover, the very process of validating relevance presumption,
by finding a context that allows the output of the linguistic
device to be processed, is in a certain sense reproduced in metaphor
interpretation8
. In fact, the whole point of interpreting
a metaphor consists of combining or integrating information in
a productive way. As we saw, metaphoric projection takes place
from focus to frame, i.e. the direction of metaphor interpretation
is the opposite from reading. This directionality or irreversibility
of metaphor has been seen as the main ground for its heuristic
potential and cognitive import, since we tend to model less known
concepts upon concrete well described domains of our experience,
therefore bringing about a conceptual innovation from available
information. In this sense, the intellectual operation described
by Black constitutes a good example of intelligent use of old
information by the system to yield new information (cf. the importance
of metaphor in scientific thought).

The construction of the context, which is presented in Relevance
Theory as an essential and constitutive part of the interpretation
process, can thus be seen as corresponding to the evocation of
Black's system of associated commonplaces, the first step in
metaphor
interpretation. In both cases, the addressee is selecting and
retrieving a set of stored general assumptions about the world
which will feed the inferential calculation.

We have seen that contextual
effects result from the combination of contextual assumptions
with the new information. We have also seen that metaphoric projection
constitutes
the application of the system of associated commonplaces from
focus to frame. In this sense, the retrieval of contextual assumptions,
as the identification of the relevant commonplaces of the source,
is the essential inferential procedure through which the system
takes advantage of its stored information, whose relevance relies
on its potential multiplicative effect.

In the example sentence, some of the conclusions drawn from the
projection of the system of associated commonplaces of "dinosaur"
to "the sense of an utterance" could be:

(4)

a.

The communicator's words and actions are the evidence left for
the addressee to reconstruct her intention, as bones and other
remains are used by the palaeontologist as a departure for his
reconstitution;

b.

The addressee is the palaeontologist;

c.

General knowledge about the world and about communication is used
by the addressee to identify the communicator's intention, as
well as knowledge about the evolution of life on Earth is used
by the palaeontologist to reconstruct a dinosaur;

d.

The dinosaur is a palaeontologist's (science) hypothesis; so is
the addressee's hypothesis about the communicator's intention.

This set of propositions not only shows the temporal development
of metaphor interpretation as a process, but also reveals the
specificity of its products, which can be conceived of as weak
implicatures, as defined above. In fact, they are implicitly conveyed
propositions (as they are triggered by the logical form of the
utterance and inferred by the addressee), they cannot be rigidly
determined in that they do not constitute a definitive closed
set and they are hierarchically produced and functionally used
by interpretation itself. These "vague effects" cannot
therefore be summarized in a single fully determinate proposition
(a strong implicature) since such a paraphrase precludes the very
possibility of communicating gradually and progressively a
great
amount of information, which to a great extent is only limited
by the interpretation availability of the addressee. In fact,
through a wider expansion of context the analogy could be almost
indefinitely enlarged.

In an important way, these features define the subordinate metaphors
that Black identified as occurring during the metaphorical projection.
As it was shown above, the identification/construction of the
metaphor's grounds relies upon the transfer of the system of associated
commonplaces from focus to frame: each of these displacements
corresponds to a proposition which in a certain sense is "a
little metaphor". The author interestingly does acknowledge that
although the set of constructed implications can be explicitly
formulated, the paraphrase will necessarily involve a loss of
the metaphor's cognitive import:

For one thing, the implications, previously left for a suitable
reader to educe for himself, with a nice feeling for their relative
priorities and degrees of importance, are now presented explicitly
as though having equal weight. (Black 1968: 46)

Moreover, these propositions do not have a proof value,9
since they cannot be demonstrated according to a deductive logical
procedure: they constitute the hearer's response to the meaning
problem created by the metaphorical utterance.

4 Concluding remarks

By comparing metaphoric utterances interpretation, as it is described
by Interaction Theory, and the Inferential Model of communication
proposed by Relevance Theory, I was pursuing two main objectives. Firstly,
I wanted to reinforce the foundations of the Inferential Model,
by showing how they are paradigmatically manifest in the condensed
metaphoric formulation. Secondly, metaphor interpretation and, more
generally, analogical reasoning can give us some insight into the
inferential
processes responsible for interpretation (as well as about other central
processes, as proposed in Wilson and Sperber 1991a: 380).

In most of their texts about inference, Sperber and Wilson insist
that the participation of non-demonstrative inference, which plays
a central role in recognizing the intended assumption, does not
preclude the action of the deductive device in this process. In
the chapter "Inference" of Sperber and Wilson (1986),
as well as in other papers on this subject, the authors almost
exclusively describe the role of deduction in generating conclusions
from the output of the linguistic device and premises supplied
by the system, thereby assuring a logically strict control of
the interpretation process and overcoming intuitive or arbitrary
explanations (given the incipiency of our knowledge about non-demonstrative
reasoning). After defining non-demonstrative reasoning as "a form
of suitably constrained guesswork" (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 69),
the authors intend to specify the nature of these constraints;
in fact, their adequacy seems to be the very condition of their
effectiveness, i.e., of their realism.

In this sense, the authors present the central system as a deductive
device, therefore overseeing the role of non-demonstrative reasoning
in the formation of hypotheses which constitute the premises of
their examples (for a close analysis of examples in Wilson and
Sperber 1981 and Wilson and Sperber 1991a, see Amaral 1999: 101102)
and they symptomatically hesitate between the expressions retrieval
and construction of implicated premises.

In doing so, "Sperber and Wilson recognize the role of such creative
hypothesis formation, but they somehow lose sight of its centrality"
(Levinson 1989: 466),
which corresponds to metaphor's lack of centrality within this theory.

As shown above, Interaction Theory also says little about the
selection and projection of the implications from focus to frame,
which brings us back to the main problem of inductive reasoning
schemes. How can these probabilistic processes be constrained?
How can we explain that absurd or irrelevant inferences are not
produced by the system? And how can the implications evoked by
the focus, as well as the contextual assumptions mobilized by
the addressee, be simultaneously explored and transformed?10
Some constructivist (in Ortony's sense: see Ortony 1979: 2)
approaches to metaphor have shed light on this subject (see e.g.
Indurkhya 1994, who argues for an
interactive view of cognition
that accounts for its objectivity, or the "experientialist synthesis"
proposed by Lakoff and Johnson 1980). According to Holland et
alii (1993), induction should be studied in a pragmatic rather
than in a syntactic perspective, therefore taking into account
the goals to which cognition is oriented.

According to Relevance Theory, humans pursue the optimisation
of the processing cost-benefit relation, cognitive efficiency
being a condition of their very survival. By allowing humans to
conceive of and communicate a great amount of information and
by being a major instrument of conceptual innovation, metaphor
is relevant also by showing us not only the imaginative character
of our rationality, but also the rationality of our imagination.

Notes

1 I will refer to the first
edition of Relevance. Communication
and Cognition. Despite the revisions from the second edition (1995),
the core of the theory that interests the aim of this paper hasn't
been altered.

2 As in most texts from Sperber
and Wilson, I will
talk about the communicator as a she and the addressee as a he.
I will talk about communicative intention (without making the
distinction between informative and communicative intention
proposed
by the authors) because the latter concept includes the former
and because in most cases identifying the communicative intention
is enough to recover the informative intention. Thus the interpretive
hypothesis will be a hypothetical inference about the communicator's
communicative intention.

4 I will only refer to nominal
metaphors (according
to Miller (1979: 233): "Nominal
metaphors: BE (x, y) when an x
is not a y."). My example is an adaptation from a comparison in
Rumelhart (1979).

5 Gibbs (1994) distinguishes process and products of
metaphor understanding. According to him, figurative language
understanding does not require more effort than processing literal
utterances, what can be shown by comparing processing times. Nevertheless
this does not prove that mental processes involved are the same
in both kinds of utterances; moreover, theory must account for
the "phenomenological awareness of figurative meaning"
(1994: 115). Gibbs suggests thus that linguistic understanding
takes place through a succession of different moments that must
be studied independently; speaker's feeling of figurative language
may be a consequence not of early understanding processes, but
of late products that result from figurative language understanding
(like richness, indetermination and openendedness of meaning).

6 According to this theory,
metaphorical blends may
allow us to project inferences in different directions. However,
metaphors characteristically present asymmetric topicality, i.e.,
"One of the inputs is topical and the other provides a means of
re-framing the first for some conceptual or communicative purpose"
(Grady et alii 1999: 13). This
functional asymmetry of metaphor's
terms is supported by empirical evidence (see Paivio 1979). Moreover,
since other sources of information may be recruited to the blend
(e.g. conceptual metaphors) the directionality of such mappings
may also be inherited and structurally relevant.

8 "Intuitively, being relevant
in a context is
a matter of connecting up with the context in some way." (Sperber and
Wilson 1986: 246)

9 In the postface of the 2nd
edition of Relevance,
the authors point out that Relevance Theory does not preview any
distinction between true and false assumptions for processing
purposes (according to their principles, both true and false assumptions
can be relevant), which is seen as a point needing revision. That
such epistemic conditions are not taken into account can be explained,
I think, by the fact that Relevance Theory is not exclusively
(nor essentially) concerned with descriptive uses of language
(see their concept of interpretive resemblance). Interestingly,
Sperber and Wilson underline that the truth of the conclusions
drawn by the system is more important than the truth of the premises,
and they significantly give fiction and analogical reasoning as
examples. In fact, truth seems to be the adequacy to the system's
goals (i.e. the outcome of the processing task, its effectiveness
in the fulfilling of specific purposes) rather than the adequacy
to a certain reality. In this sense, not only truth but cognition
as well is envisaged in a pragmatic rather than in an epistemic
way.

10 "The study of induction,
then, is the study
of how knowledge is modified through its use. [sic]" (Holland et
alii 1993: 5).